The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

  Want to be amazed?

  The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an incredible story about a boy's life in Malawi.  In abject poverty, in the midst of a famine, while his parents cannot pay for school, he teaches himself more about electricity than I know (Not that I'm exactly the paradigm of electricity knowledge, but I know a fair bit about it), and builds his own windmill to provide electricity to his house.

  I will freely admit I know next to nothing about Malawi.  Our World Vision sponsored child lives there, and I know that it's in Africa.  That's about where my knowledge ends.  But the story of William is an incredible story, mostly because there are so many points where William could have given up.  He mentions it at different points in the story, about how easily he could have become just another subsistence farmer, destined to live according to the fates of the rains and government corruption.  But he wants more than that--he wants better.

  So he sets out to build a windmill, like he has read about in the books he checks out from the library while he waits for his parents to find money to send him back to school.  It's a crude device, fastened out of whatever is available in the junkyard and what he can beg and borrow from friends and family.  But it works--it works marvelously, and he can charge people's cell phones and wire his house with electricity and play the radio and more.  His windmill takes him from Malawi to South Africa to Los Angeles to Dartmouth.

  In the midst of the book, a large chunk of the telling is focused on the famine that hit Malawi.  This is where I confess that I had no idea that a famine hit Malawi.  Rachel and I were talking last night about how difficult it is to keep up with all the news stories of the world, especially given the tragic nature of so many of them.  I wish I could say that I had been moved to action when famine hit Malawi.  I wish I could say the same for the famine that is taking place in Somalia right now--it is claiming the lives of thousands, and is a heartbreaking tragedy.  I don't know what it is about our isolation from such stories, but surely there is something that God calls us to when famine strikes these already poor pockets of the world.  I pray for the wisdom to respond in the best way, be it through prayer or donations or some other path.  It is a terrible thing, made worse by governments that seem to not care about the lives of the people.  May we, as the people of God, find some response and serve those in desperate need.

William's Website